You're In It On Your Own
by redcheese
Summary: Rukia is reminded of her past, or rather, she's reminded her inablity to remember it. Ichigo tells her he's here for her in his own quiet way as he always does. No outright pairing here, oneshot.


I'd been out of practice for such a long time, so I decided to start off by presenting Rukia in a different light. It's not an outright pairing, but the presence emotional intimacy is heavily implied.  
**edit: I messed up here (thank you _Inome Higurashi_ for pointing it out) but I shan't delete it. While reading the story please pretend that Rukia was a youth, not a baby when she came to soul society. Apologies.**

You're In It On Your Own

It had been an odd, empty weekend.

No hollows, no homework - none of the usual weekend hassle that they usually waded through. Ichigo had sprawled himself out on the rooftop that they had chosen as the crow's nest of the day's ship. He didn't seem to mind having nothing to do. In fact, he seemed quite content with that, and Rukia couldn't for the life of her figure out how he could feel that way about the mundane, borish...purposelessness of the past day.

Was that even a word? Not that she cared much about vocabulary, but she liked to be accurate. It felt good, being accurate. She wanted to ask the one who was soaking in the sunlight like a sunbathing reptile about that word, but to do so would be to question her own accuracy.

Which was a silly thing to do, of course.

Rukia watched Ichigo's hair sway in the light breeze - it was like watching grass on a windy day, just that this grass was orange.

The wind died down after a while. Rukia took her attention away from him and flipped open her phone in half-hearted hope of an assignment. There was unfortunately, none. The resident shinigami was on the ball this weekend. Rukia couldn't help but wish rather ruefully that he wasn't, which immediately made her feel terribly guilty. Hollows ate souls and made even more hollows to eat even more souls, so she should be grateful. Being silly and self-centred wasn't the way to go for a shinigami, no, it definitely wasn't.

At this point of her self-berating train of thought, Ichigo woke from his nap.

"Oi. Rukia."

The soul of a small girl was sitting in the middle of the street, knees drawn up to her chest. She was in a yellow dress, and probably was about twelve years old. Something about her struck a chord somewhere, but Rukia ignored it and got ready for konso.

The little round face was framed by black hair.

"I'm not going to hurt you. You'll be going to Soul Society, where it's safe."

The little round face looked scared, too, and asked whether she would get to see her father and mother there.

Rukia started to tell the lie she had been telling for so many years, but this time her breath caught, and she could only manage a shaky nod before pressing the end of the sword handle to the soul's forehead.

When the ritual was over, Ichigo watched her return to the roof and watched her stare at the spot where the girl had been. He touched her shoulder with the tips of his fingers. She turned around after a while and affixed him with a blank stare that was somehow filled with so many things that he knew were so hard for her to say. He was only able to identify guilt.

"My konso was more than a hundred years ago. I can barely remember where I was when the shinigami found me."

She paused, breathing deeply with the effort of recollection.

"But the face of the shinigami who sent me - I'll still know it if I see her again. She lied about me seeing my family again, like all shinigami do to souls that they perform konso on."

Rukia looked at her feet as he kept his fingertips on her shoulder. She glanced at him for a second, then back down to the tiles of the roof and spoke again.

"But the thing that gets me is that I couldn't remember what kind of person I was and what my parents looked like after the first week in Rukongai. They didn't wipe my memories so that I wouldn't be aware of my past at all, but they seem to have put a sort of...block in my brain. Not a good solid block, either, I- I know that the memories are floating around in there somewhere, I feel them so well sometimes, but when I reach out for it my fingers always fall short of the handle and I can't open the door."

It would have seemed like a monotoned recant if not for the undercurrent of well-controlled frustration.

"I can't open the door."

Swallowing the lump in her throat, she went on.

"And now I'm starting to stop feeling those memories. The handle gets further and further away, and I no longer fall short of it - I can't even see the door anymore. I'm losing my past, and I've probably lost it by now."

Ichigo put his arms around her because he didn't know what to say. But she stepped backwards and shook her head firmly, still staring at the tiles.

"Leave me be. It's not so much of rejecting your company, but more of my need to do this on my own. Telling you about this alone is over-stepping my boundaries of self-sufficiency. Thank you for being here for me."

He said nothing, just nodded.

His silence could be interpreted as dissent, however when she finally brought her gaze from the tiles to his, she knew that although he couldn't possibly know what she was going through, he understood how much it meant to her to know that she could deal with it on her own.

Without anyone else.

End.


End file.
